In the window where Viber then Whatsapp took off in my country it was €1 for 200mb of data on prepay but €0.15 per SMS. So if you sent more than 7-8 texts in th

In the window where Viber then Whatsapp took off in my country it was €1 for 200mb of data on prepay but €0.15 per SMS. So if you sent more than 7-8 texts in the day the data was cheaper, and I think MMS were like €0.60 each. Can't say people, to this day, have much of a culture of using whatsapp video calls. Skype was the majority in the Whatsapp takeover time and today it's a mix of Zoom and Skype. International calls also weren't that common. So sounds like there may have been different motivations in your country than mine.